I used to think the Maori elders hanging silent in the living room were my great-grandparents, dead before I had the chance to know them. The man had thinning, snow-white hair and almost-open lips that told me stories, when I sat and listened close, about the first world war, his garden or a fishing trip. The woman’s eyes were black and cushioned bright on crinkled skin I knew would feel like brown-bag paper underneath my lips, were I to climb and kiss her canvas face. The paintings came from New Zealand, like my grandma who ate vittamins and woke us up for morning tea. She said she’d brought them over when she first came to the States to keep a piece of home nearby, and called them my inheritance so I could always see where part of me was from. I’d close my eyes to listen to her stories about Auckland, a carpenter father and a mother who could sew, and see the living faces of the elders on the wall: a hammer in his hand, face gleaming with sweat, a needle in her teeth; feet pumping the old wrought-iron sewing machine. Grandma had shown me snapshots of her parents, black and white and holding grocery bags, or waving stiff in Sunday clothes but they were small and faded, far away and nothing like the warmly lighted elders underneath whose eyes I’d played most every day of my short growing up, and so I never wondered why the brown warmth of his skin, the moka tattooed green around her chin, the hui feather robes they wore, were different from my freckles, straight brown hair and corduroy: they just seemed natural to me familiar in the way of things you never learned but simply knew about like blood and breath and mother’s touch.
Ali Fischer